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OCTAL: The Online Course Tool for Adaptive Learning

Daniel Armendariz, Zachary MacHardy and Dan Garcia

The Online Course Tool for Adaptive Learning (OCTAL) is an adaptive exercise system that customizes the progression of question topics to each student. By creating a concept dependency graph of topics in a course and modeling a student’s knowledge state, the tool will present questions that test knowledge within a student’s zone of proximal development. We intend OCTAL to be a formative assessment tool that is not tied to any specific course by providing language-agnostic questions on computer science concepts. While the tool will be generalizable for many courses, our first prototype will include a concept map and question set from an introductory CS1 course, UC Berkeley’s CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing. Using the tool, we are investigating metacognitive improvements in the identification of knowledge gaps by presenting online course material in a nonlinear fashion.